NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a few functions that helps parsing and construction of valid HTTP header values. None of the functions are exported by default.

The following functions are available:

split_header_words( @header_values )

This function will parse the header values given as argument into a list of anonymous arrays containing key/value pairs. The function knows how to deal with ",", ";" and "=" as well as quoted values after "=". A list of space separated tokens are parsed as if they were separated by ";".

If the @header_values passed as argument contains multiple values, then they are treated as if they were a single value separated by comma ",".

This means that this function is useful for parsing header fields that follow this syntax (BNF as from the HTTP/1.1 specification, but we relax the requirement for tokens).

Each header is represented by an anonymous array of key/value pairs. The keys will be all be forced to lower case. The value for a simple token (not part of a parameter) is undef. Syntactically incorrect headers will not necessarily be parsed as you would want.

If you don't want the function to convert tokens and attribute keys to lower case you can call it as _split_header_words instead (with a leading underscore).

join_header_words( @arrays )

This will do the opposite of the conversion done by split_header_words(). It takes a list of anonymous arrays as arguments (or a list of key/value pairs) and produces a single header value. Attribute values are quoted if needed.